In this interview with Artima, Loren Corbridge, manager of Sybase's Eclipse-based IDE, talks about developers' increasing involvement in a variety of business and management tasks, such as data and business analysis, and about developers' changing roles in the enterprise:

I am prevented from downloading MP3 files at work, so I apologize if my comment is out of context.

What Loren observes has been true since I got into the field around 1992, so I don't think it is a new development. My observation is that the "business" role asked of the developer is more related to the size of the company and the company's primary business focus.

> I am prevented from downloading MP3 files at work, so I> apologize if my comment is out of context.> > What Loren observes has been true since I got into the> field around 1992, so I don't think it is a new> development. My observation is that the "business" role> asked of the developer is more related to the size of the> company and the company's primary business focus.

Someone should do a survey about whether people prefer podcasts to traditional interview transcripts. I hate podcasts.

Anyway, how would you say it is related to size and business focus?

I would say it mostly depends on the IT/development organization. Some organizations promote acquiring domain knowledge. Some emphasise only technical knowledge. Developers also tend to gravitate one way or the other.

Overall I would say the "industry" is far more concerned with technical skills, but our customers are far more balanced.

> Anyway, how would you say it is related to size and> business focus?> > I would say it mostly depends on the IT/development> organization. Some organizations promote acquiring domain> knowledge. Some emphasise only technical knowledge.> Developers also tend to gravitate one way or the other.

I agree that it is organization dependent. Let me use some examples to explain what I meant. A number of years ago I worked in the IT department for a hospital. We had precisely two developers, including myself, and a UNIX administrator. The IT department was small enough that, in order to work on their electronic patient chart system, I sat with the clinicians as they used our system and was able to see first hand how they use information we provided. It gave me an application domain knowledge that I don't believe a developer in a medical software company would have. Contrast this experience with my following job which was developing software for a financial company. The development staff was much larger - around 90 people including analysts. On one particularly large project, I was not allowed to talk with the user community. All knowledge of the business came through business analysts. I believe organizational size determines how much specialization can occur. At the hospital, I did analysis, coding, database administration, support, and project management. At the finance company, we had business analysts, DBA's, support staff, and project managers. The finance company simply had a larger staff, which allowed for specialization.

Referring back to my comment about a hypothetical developer in a medical software company versus me in a hospital IT shop. The hypothetical developer would probably have a much greater knowledge of traditional computer science topics, for instance algorithmic analysis or language design, than I would because I'm not being called on to know those areas: it was not what the hospital cared about. Where a software company benefits by having very technically skilled developers, my employer cared more about my having a greater understanding of how its people worked. (I'm not implying that developers in a medical software company don't acquire knowledge of the users' needs over time, but it takes longer than it does for someone working directly with a physician for instance.)

> Overall I would say the "industry" is far more concerned> with technical skills, but our customers are far more> balanced.

The technology industry is definitely more concerned with technical skills. When developers work for non-technology industries, e.g. financial/medical/etc., there's less emphasis on technical skills and much more on understanding the organization and how the software is used.

> I agree with Bill Pyne. Business has always preferred> something more than a code monkey, but I guess the> difference now is that we have these highly extensible> tool frameworks like Eclipse.

I'd say it's more like 70% of business that prefers something more than a code monkey. I think there's a substantial minority that believe software development failures are caused by software developers trying to think rather than simply doing as their told.

IMHO you can see a lot of pandering to this perception in a lot of agile development literature.

> I am prevented from downloading MP3 files at work, so I> apologize if my comment is out of context.> > What Loren observes has been true since I got into the> field around 1992, so I don't think it is a new> development. My observation is that the "business" role> asked of the developer is more related to the size of the> company and the company's primary business focus.